


A Sight for Sore Eyes (The Eye of the Storm Remix)

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Era, Espionage, F/M, Mission Fic, Wartime, Wartime Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 07:58:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4172037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, ever so rarely, her mission and his overlap long enough for a moment of peace in the middle of it all. Peggy meets Captain Rogers and the Howling Commandos to deliver some important intelligence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sight for Sore Eyes (The Eye of the Storm Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [victoria_p (musesfool)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesfool/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Sight for Sore Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4037404) by [victoria_p (musesfool)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesfool/pseuds/victoria_p). 



“It’ll have to be you, Carter,” Colonel Phillips told her from behind the newspaper she had just handed over his desk to him, folded around the field report she had carefully tucked inside. His overgrown eyebrows rose just a little toward his hairline when he peeked past the report to the sports page behind it. With a disgruntled sigh, he folded it up and dropped it onto a haphazard stack of intelligence reports on his desk.

Peggy wasn’t surprised that she was the one chosen to go. One of the benefits of being the Colonel’s aide was that she was empowered to move freely, protected by his authority, and without ever being suspected of doing anything more important than fetching his coffee. Or, as in this case, bringing him the news of the Senators’ dismal season back in Washington.

She straightened her back and stared past the Phillips’ shoulder, her hands tucked primly behind her back. “I’ll need a ride.”

“Of course,” he sighed, reaching for his phone. “Ask Goldstein to fly you to the drop site tonight. We’re on a tight schedule with this one, so you’ll need to brief Rogers and the rest of them yourself when you get to the safe house.”

Peggy’s mouth fell slightly. “Captain Rogers and the Commandos are on another mission, as I recall.”

His fingers hovered over the rotary dial and he looked pensive, as if he had just solved two problems with a single solution. “And hauling their sorry asses out of there at double speed. You’ll want to ask Lorraine to transmit the coordinates of the safe house to Captain Rogers.”

She tipped her head in acknowledgement and saluted him before turning on her heel. 

Peggy later sent up a silent blessing to the intelligence analyst who had written their report with such succinct grace. She’d had no problem memorizing its contents while making arrangements with Goldstein and Lorraine for her excursion, but the aerial photographs that had caused the wrinkle in Colonel Phillips’ eyebrow would have to come with her. She folded them carefully and zipped them inside the breast pocket of her jacket.

She was officially taking a weekend’s liberty in the English country, and Peggy made sure to drop hints that she was hoping to see the lakes with anyone who expressed envy that she was getting away for even a weekend. Erroneous assumptions that Peggy was visiting her English family made for an excellent cover while Lorraine calmly tapped out the coded coordinates of the safe house to Captain Rogers. 

At 2300 sharp, Peggy slipped out of her quarters and slung her pack over one shoulder, camouflaged in black and covered in light body armor. Lorraine met her just off the runway, holding a file folder and wearing a knowing smile. 

“They’re sixty miles away,” she reported crisply, falling into stride next to Peggy. “You’ll probably beat them there.”

Peggy lifted an eyebrow at her and peered over her hands at the neatly-printed message. “I’ll need to, if we have any intention of keeping that safe house. They aren’t the most _delicate_ in their movement.”

Lorraine closed the folder. “There’s heavy flight activity around the drop site, so you’ll be flying in the dark. The resistance knows to expect you, but you’ll have to get there on your own. No flares.”

“Ah, I suppose it can’t always be a trip to the Lake District,” Peggy sighed and smiled at her as they approached the plane, where Goldstein was running his final pre-flight checks. “Thank you, Private.”

Lorraine saluted her. “Give my best to the Captain.” Then she was gone into the night. 

Peggy climbed up into the back of the small plane and secured her parachute while Goldstein got them off the ground. They flew in silence, Peggy taking up the seat next to him and scanned the horizon for activity while he focused on navigating them without the guidance of the moonlight. 

When they were within a few miles of the drop site, she broke their silence and pointed to a far-off point of light. 

“That will be the activity Private Lorraine warned us about,” she told him, unbuckling herself and climbing into the back. “I’ll drop a little sooner than we expected and continue toward our contact on foot.”

Goldstein gave a sharp nod and lowered the plane incrementally, his mouth pinched together tightly. They had precious little time before the planes came close enough to detect them, and Peggy wasted none of it while pulling on her pack and the parachute. She took one last look past Goldstein’s shoulder to the horizon before reaching for the switch to open the door on the plane. 

“Turn back,” she shouted over the rising roar of the wind. “I’ll see you in a few days.”

The jump was beautiful, she thought, the swift descent slamming into a slow drift when she deployed the black parachute and dangled toward the tree line. When she cut herself free on the ground, she packed it neatly back into its bag and started through the wood, pausing only long enough to orient herself with a quick look to the sky.

*

A gray line emerged on the horizon a quarter-hour before Peggy emerged from the edge of the trees she had carefully stayed hidden within. It was too early in the season for their foliage to have filled in completely, and she’d counted four planes searching the area above her, but the heart-striking buzz of engines had retreated far into the distance some hours before the dawn, suggesting that they had found nothing interesting. Peggy hoped Goldstein had returned safely.

The dull light spread rapidly across the horizon before Peggy spotted a decrepit stable, the stones from a hole in the far wall scattered across the ground with rotten thatch from the roof. The old barn appeared just as it had been described in the report she’d left with Colonel Phillips and, though it was quite late enough that any of the local farmers might have ventured out to do their morning chores, there was no one in sight. 

Peggy lifted her hands to her mouth and whistled clearly into the crisp air. The warble of a Baltimore oriole echoed across the pasture and seemed to hang too long between the trees before it was answered. She ducked from the trees and sprinted toward the barn, her pack thumping uncomfortably as she slipped through the hole in the wall of the stable and circled around quickly, hands ready at her belt to draw her pistol.

“You must be the Englishwoman,” came a sleep-hoarse French voice. “They told me about you.”

An elderly woman, bent over her cane, watched her from a dark corner, as if she was appraising her trustworthiness from afar. Peggy lowered her hands from her belt and held them in front of her to show they were empty.

“I am.” 

“Good.” The woman beckoned her toward the far end of the barn and knocked a bundle of damp straw from the top of a feed hatch with perfectly maintained hinges. Peggy helped her open the doors and peered down into the dark passage.

Gripping the hatch with one scarred hand, the old woman nodded inside. “I will need to wake Martine to start the milking. The others are waiting for you.”

“Thank you.” Peggy reached for the flashlight she had mercifully remembered to attach to her belt and climbing down into the hatch, which extended some twenty-five feet down and smelled intensely of clean earth. Above her, the doors slammed heavily into place and the faint scratching of the old woman replacing the straw was all she heard for several moments until she reached the bottom and turned on her flashlight. 

A long tunnel stretched ahead of her, but Peggy touched the place where the wall met a rough-hewn wooden door and stepped back as it cracked open. A fresh-faced girl peeped around the edge and gave her a swift once-over before summoning her inside.

“ _Maman,_ ” she called inside the room and pushed the door open so Peggy could see inside. She switched off the flashlight as the flickering electric light flooded the heavy darkness of the passageway, and followed the girl inside. Another woman stood in front of the table, blocking it from Peggy’s view, and reached for the girl—a teenager, Peggy could see now—with one arm. There were two men, middle-aged and weather-beaten in complexion, conferring in the corner with a radio receiver and taking notes in jumbled shorthand.

“Margaret Carter,” she said firmly, clipping the flashlight to her belt once again and dropping her pack in front of the door. “I’m with the SSR.” 

Peggy had learned to introduce herself immediately to avoid the suspicions of the resistance whenever she met them. She had no expectation that they would give her their names, the risk for their safety much higher than hers in doing so. 

“We heard about you,” the woman answered, gesturing to the radio receiver before she began to tidy the table for her. “You have questions about the trains.”

“Yes,” she breathed, glad to get on to business. She approached the table and set out the photographs she had brought with her. “The RAF took aerial surveillance of this site in the mountains, believed to be the destination of the trains.” She flipped to the next and looked up sharply when the girl gasped at the image before continuing:

“There is an impressively advanced German facility hidden there, which has been for quite a few months receiving large shipments of cargo.” 

“They have a schedule.” One of the men came from the corner, carrying the paper he had been taking notes on. “They stop in the next village for food, and I saw the… sea creature on their cargo boxes.”

“Hydra,” Peggy supplied immediately and felt her heart skip a beat. “Have you made a copy of the train schedule?”

The woman exchanged a meaningful look with the man remaining beside the receiver, and he brought her a crisp sheet of the previous week’s paper, the times and dates written in looped cursive in the margins. 

“There was one other train. The last train,” the woman said when Peggy looked up from the schedule. The last train listed had come the day prior. The next was due in five more days. 

“Was it different?” 

The woman nodded curtly. “It carried people. Soldiers. They were guarding civilians. They did not seem terribly important, but they did seem afraid. The soldiers took twice as much cheese that time. I heard them say they were preparing for someone named Zola.”

Peggy made her face blank and stared at the page again without focusing on the words. She spent as much time chasing empty leads across France as she did collecting meaningful intelligence, but this was different. Peggy replaced the photographs and the train schedule in her breast pocket and removed a thin stack of banknotes, which she set on the table for them with an air of a transaction completed. The men appeared to relax with the sign that she was finished asking questions and would be gone soon, taking some of the danger to their lives with her.

“Then I have less time than I thought. I must go,” she said urgently, casting her eyes to each of them in turn. “Thank you, each of you, for the pains you have undergone to contact us.”

“It will be past dawn by now,” said the man from the corner. 

“And you will be late to town if you wait much longer to take her,” the woman answered him immediately, with yet another meaningful expression. She beckoned Peggy to the table and showed her the map she had covered before: lovingly copied from a topographical map and gently sketched over with the location of every safe house for fifty miles. 

“This is the place,” she instructed, sliding her finger down the lines of the roads deliberately, to show Peggy the way she would need to follow. “Go in the back of the wagon now and slip out the back when you come to town. You will be there just after nightfall.”

“Thank you,” Peggy echoed herself once more, scanning the map before lifting her pack from the floor and following the group into the passageway, the electric light flickering off behind them.

*

The woman hadn’t been entirely wrong. It was after nightfall when Peggy arrived at the safe house, though several hours after the last of the day’s light finally faded out. It hadn’t been a comfortable day, particularly when the shadowed morning turned to driving rain, but Peggy staggered through the back door of the farmhouse and groaned with relief.

Several candles had been left to burn in the windows and the smoldering remains of a fire waiting to be tended glowed their welcome to her. There was a large basket on the kitchen table which revealed itself to be the prospect of a much-anticipated meal upon closer inspection, and Peggy was relieved to see that the house had been equipped with a modern plumbing system. It was in every way an ideal respite from the day behind her and the one that awaited her when dawn came again. 

Peggy built up the fire with dry wood stacked in the corner, filled a large cauldron with water for washing clothes and set it over the crackling flames to heat slowly. Ever aware of her own priorities, she started the kettle for a strong cup of tea before she shed the sodden outer layers of her clothing and set them in front of the fire. The steady work gave her something to do with her hands as her mind whirred ahead of her, calculating distance and time against the train schedule she had placed under the stone cup meant for her tea.

There was little time to spare, she knew, if they had any hope of catching the next train. Colonel Phillips had suspected as much when he sent her. If they were lucky, if Peggy was _right_ , it would be Zola’s. 

When she was satisfied that she had run through all the available interpretations of the intelligence she had, she uncovered the small transmitter she had buried at the bottom of her pack and set it up on the table. Private Lorraine would be on duty to receive her message, and Colonel Phillips barely slept as it was. 

Peggy tapped out the coded message and waited for the response with a pencil in hand. Sure enough, Private Lorraine’s steady, almost musical tapping came back on the line, confirming that Steve and the Commandos were within range. Shelter in place, depart at first light. 

Peggy sighed and went to the second floor of the house and filled the bathtub with steaming water. A bath was a rare treat and she had no intention of letting it slip by her, even if it was meant to be a curtailed luxury. She found a lump of strongly-scented lemon soap and scrubbed away layers of grime with determined industriousness that served to keep her awake.

By the time she returned downstairs to take up her post near the door—her hair pinned back, fully dressed in a fresh set of black fatigues, her lipstick neatly applied—the clock on the wall indicated that it was well past midnight and Steve was late.

She only had a little longer to wait. By the time the clock ticked closer to one, she saw a flash of light from the nearer end of the pasture, then another. Peggy smiled at the morse code message— _knock knock_ —and lit a second candle for the window to signal them to approach, silently counting their figures when the shuffled into the house. The Commandos looked a fine mess, but they were all there. Peggy breathed out, capturing Steve’s eyes when he came through last, and locked the door behind them. 

“Welcome back, gentlemen. There are two baths on this floor. You’ll find everything you need,” she announced to them, setting her eyes on each of them in turn. “Sergeant Barnes, I suppose we’ll save the briefing for the morning?”

“That would be better,” he answered with apparent relief.

“Captain Rogers,” Peggy said sharply, striding to the table and picking up her tea and her papers. “I’ll show you to your room.”

Dugan snorted through his arms as he shucked his body armor, only to grunt when Dernier elbowed him sharply for dripping mud onto the clean floors. Bucky caught Peggy’s elbow as she passed him again and she gave him a reassuring smile. 

“It’s good news, Sergeant,” she said, just loud enough for Steve to hear. When Bucky released her elbow and the tension lifted from his forehead, she led Steve up the stairs to the room she had dressed herself in.

She waited with her back turned until Steve undressed and tumbled into the bath, spilling water onto the rug and moaning softly, and handed the cup of hot tea over to him when she settled on the stool beside the tub. 

“You’re a sight,” Steve breathed and Peggy leaned into the hand he held out for her. “How long did it take you to get here?”

“I left the Colonel last night,” she said and picked up the soap she’d used, smoothing it over his shoulders and down the curve of his spine, working it into a lather that quickly turned brown with mud and ran in streams down his skin. 

“And you haven’t slept.” Steve seemed to be trying to look severe, but Peggy ignored the implicit question by setting aside the soap and massaging her fingers into his tightened scalp. When she finished, she handed him a bucket to rinse with. 

“I’m glad to see you, too, Steve.” Her palm lingered on the curve of his neck, curling affectionately behind his ear, and she lifted his face to hers. His mouth tasted faintly of mud, but the heavy scent of the soap and the tea overpowered her. Peggy felt herself warm from her knees to her shoulders as surely as if someone had dropped a coal into her stomach. 

A soft whimper rose in her ears, and Peggy had moved to quiet Steve before she realized it was her own. Steve gave a muffled laugh and Peggy pulled away regretfully, retreating to the relative safety of her papers while he finished his bath. 

Steve came beside her, peering down at the photographs of the Hydra base with a towel in his hand and wearing only his shorts.

“That’s our next target, isn’t it?” 

“Yes.” Peggy set them face-down on a chair, and rested her fingertips on his firm abdomen. “I’ll brief you and Sergeant Barnes in the morning. You have time to rest here a day or two before you need to worry about that.”

“Then we have a little time to take it easy.” Steve’s smile came slow and languid and Peggy felt the same, swooping desire she’d always known for this man creep up her spine. 

“Steve,” she sighed, and didn’t have the heart to speak aloud what he already knew: that she was leaving before him; that she would never be able to go with him to all the places he went.

Before she could stop herself, she pinched out the candle on the table and closed her slim, calloused hand around his wrist, drawing him nearer still. Steve allowed her to guide him to the bed, edging back onto the impossibly soft coverlet until Peggy’s knees were pressed on either side of his hips and his hands could safely rest on her waist. 

“You’ll have to be quiet,” she breathed into his neck, tracing the hard edge of his stubbled jaw with her lips. “The others are awake.”

“Me?” Steve laughed, his head toppling back until the center of their gravity—somewhere between her clothed thighs and the pulsing warmth pressed against her belly—shifted backward and Peggy tumbled forward onto his chest. Pleasure branched like lightning from anywhere his skin brushed hers and the remaining tension from the day that lingered evaporated from her limbs, leaving her light-headed and giddy.The bed creaked out a soft complaint, but the noise was covered by the steady drum of the rain outside their window.

In the morning, she would brief Steve on the Commando’s next mission into the mountains and return to Colonel Phillips to report on her mission. Steve and the others would rest for the day before leaving the safe house after dark, chasing down Peggy’s hunch into the mountains. There was every chance that it would be weeks before they could see each other in even the most formal of situations. Equally possible was that she could be captured, or he could be killed, and she would never see him again.

Peggy chose to forget to care about the danger around them, or for what awaited them not so far ahead. She had just those last moments before Steve’s cheek settled like a weight on her shoulder and they fell heavily into sleep and had long ago learned to find the rare moments of respite offered up by the universe. 

And while there was the smallest chance they would still be offered to her, Peggy would do whatever she could to meet them, wherever they might be.


End file.
